Survivors in Philippines steal, beg for help

Wednesday

Nov 13, 2013 at 12:01 AMNov 13, 2013 at 1:09 PM

TACLOBAN, Philippines - Increasingly desperate survivors of Typhoon Haiyan mobbed the shattered airport here yesterday, begging for food, water or a flight to escape the chaotic aftermath of the storm. Haiyan flattened this city of 220,000 five days earlier and ravaged vast swaths of the country's midsection.

TACLOBAN, Philippines — Increasingly desperate survivors of Typhoon Haiyan mobbed the shattered airport here yesterday, begging for food, water or a flight to escape the chaotic aftermath of the storm.

Haiyan flattened this city of 220,000 five days earlier and ravaged vast swaths of the country’s midsection.

Even as an enormous global aid effort gathered momentum and relief supplies began trickling into the airport here and elsewhere, officials did not have a full grasp of the magnitude of the devastation and could provide no guidance on when basic emergency needs could be met.

In the first reported deaths as a result of looting, eight people were crushed to death when a wall collapsed as they and thousands of others stormed a rice warehouse on Leyte Island, the worst-hit region, said National Food Authority spokesman Rex Estoperez.

Since the storm, people have broken into homes, malls and garages, where they have stripped the shelves of food, water and other goods. Authorities have struggled to stop the looting. There were unconfirmed reports of armed gangs involved in some instances.

President Benigno S. Aquino III suggested that estimates of 10,000 or more dead might turn out to be high, but international relief officials said they were still assuming the worst and expressed worry that bottlenecks and delays could prevent them from reaching millions of victims for days.

The travails reached new heights yesterday in Tacloban, a formerly thriving city in the east-central Philippines that the typhoon hit full force.

Wearing face masks or pulling their shirts up over their noses to suppress the smell of bodies rotting on the streets, a procession of survivors 3 miles long walked toward the airport, where relief supplies had begun to arrive.

They witnessed the despair of survivors like Erroll de la Cruz, 34, who squatted next to the pavement to scrawl the names of his wife, Michelle, and her 7-year-old son, Matthew, on a piece of plywood. Then, he walked across the crowded road and laid the plywood between their corpses, in the hope that their lives would be remembered, and their bodies someday traced.

“I don’t think I can handle this by myself,” he said quietly.

The people of Tacloban have been struggling largely on their own to deal with the devastation.

The devastation apparent during an 8-mile drive into the city center made the extent of the challenge clear. Mounds of debris up to 15 feet high towered next to the main road. Concrete pillars and other hazards had fallen into the traffic lanes, forcing drivers, motorcyclists and pedestrians to dodge and weave.